Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
I knew that CollegeHumor was a powerhouse, but I never realized what kind of numbers until I looked this up.
As of November 2019, The CollegeHumor YouTube channel has reached over 7.1 billion views, and over 13.5 million subscribers.
As many have noted, the economics of video are insane. Between dealing with monopolies like Facebook and Youtube and competing against VC funded unicorns, even an extraordinarily successful and apparently well managed company can find itself doomed.
I was going to segue into into mockery of Quibi, but I'm just too depressed.
“The Witcher” starts with Henry Cavill and his chiseled jaw battling a gurgling swamp monster. According to Netflix, 76 million member households watched at least this far.
Netflix counts people who watch the first two minutes of the show as viewers. So if you moved onto something else, you still boosted Netflix’s ratings.
“That two-minute period is enough of an indicator for them to [have a] very clear indication of people completing it,” said Courtney Williams, head of partnerships at Parrot Analytics. “So they don’t have to go all the way through.”
Here's the thing. You don't really need an indicator of how many people completed a show (even a very, very clear one), if you already know the actual number who did., No company has fetishized the collection of viewer data more than Netflix. They track how long you watched, when you paused, where you rewinded.
Though it's not the best measure of how many people have watched a show, the 2-minute warning does give us an excellent read on interest/curiosity level, how well your marketing and PR worked, how appealing your stars are, how much people listen to your recommendation engine.
And it produces really impressive numbers like 76 million.
In an industry where billions are spent every year on promoting content, there is a legitimate business need for these metrics, but they leave some people wanting more.
But Netflix still has investors who want to know who kept watching.
“It is proverbially grading one’s own homework, and there has to be a bit more transparency,” said Tim Hanlon, CEO of media advisory investment group Vertere.
Netflix probably knows how many people finished “The Witcher.” But unless investors press for more details, we never will.
Furthermore, even allowing for the worst possible case scenarios with environmental disasters and the best for terraforming technologies, earth will always be nicer than Mars.
One of those hurdles is radiation. For reasons unclear to me, this
tends to get pushed aside compared to other questions to do with Mars's
atmosphere (akin to sitting 30km above Earth with no oxygen),
temperatures, natural resources (water), nasty surface chemistry
(perchlorates), and lower surface gravitational acceleration (1/3rd that
on Earth).
...
The bottom line is that the extremely thin atmosphere on Mars, and
the absence of a strong global magnetic field, result in a complex and
potent particle radiation environment. There are lower energy solar wind
particles (like protons and helium nuclei) and much higher energy
cosmic ray particles crashing into Mars all the time. The cosmic rays,
for example, also generate substantial secondary radiation - crunching
into martian regolith to a depth of several meters before hitting an
atomic nucleus in the soil and producing gamma-rays and neutron
radation.
...
However, if we consider just the dose on Mars, the rate of exposure
averaged over one Earth year is just over 20 times that of the maximum
allowed for a Department of Energy radiation worker in the US (based off
of annual exposure). And that's for a one-off trip. Now imagine you're a settler, perhaps
in your 20s and you're planning on living on Mars for at least (you'd
hope) another 50 Earth years. Total lifetime exposure on Mars? Could be
pushing 18 sieverts.
Now that's kind of into uncharted territory. If you got 8 sieverts
all at once, for example, you will die. But getting those 8 sieverts
spread out over a couple of decades could be perfectly survivable, or
not. The RAD measurements on Mars also coincided with a low level of
solar particle activity, and vary quite a bit as the atmospheric
pressure varies (which it does on an annual basis on Mars).
Of course you need not spend all your time above surface on Mars. But
you'd need to put a few meters of regolith above you, or live in some
deep caves and lava tubes
to dodge the worst of the radiation. And then there are risks not to do
with cancer that we're only just beginning to learn about.
Specifically, there is evidence that neurological function
is particularly sensitive to radiation exposure, and there is the
question of our essential microbiome and how it copes with long-term,
persistent radiation damage. Finally, as Hassler et al. discuss, the
"flavor" (for want of a better word) of the radiation environment on
Mars is simply unlike that on Earth, not just measured by extremes but
by its make up, comprising different components than on Earth's surface.
To put all of this another way: in the worst case scenario (which may
or may not be a realistic extrapolation) there's a chance you'd end up
dead or stupid on Mars. Or both.
Once again.
academics prove the obvious: "The preferences of the rich have
more weight in the policy process than the preferences of the
poor." https://t.co/eovI8FWEZX
Current Affairs
has a .org domain, so this could really screw us, and would mean that if
we wanted to keep our site a private equity firm could gouge us out of
more of our subscribers' dollars and leave less left over to
make a magazine. https://t.co/5Lutb5rFlN
"Clearview AI said its facial recognition software
had been used by more than 600 police departments and government
groups, incl. the FBI. But in at least 2 cases, the company suggested it
was working with a police department simply because it had submitted a
lead to a tip line" https://t.co/b4I4KYddRl
"The
reason I'm about to do a cowardly contemptible thing is that I
am so offended at Adam Schiff for predicting that I would do a cowardly
contemptible thing."
1. There’s zero
chance she agreed to go off the record after the end of the recorded
part of that interview. 2. It’s worth a note here
that when Ari set up the interview on @npratc
last night, he made a point of saying it was airing in its entirety,
unedited. https://t.co/lWF2oJ3Gow
Senator James
Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, stepped up to a bank of microphones in
the basement of the Capitol to announce that he was not afraid of the
president*. https://t.co/JslkMnr2rD
This is really
the entirety of what you need to know about the President's
defense. "You will find that the President did absolutely
nothing wrong." pic.twitter.com/j3vddMBU6Z
After talking
about the MI Dem voters who left the presidential line on their ballots
blank, Michael Moore tells the Cedar Falls crowd:
"We're all going to vote for who the Democrat
is." He holds for applause. No boos. But he pivots to warn
against "compromise" candidates.
The framers
feared "a British-style parliamentary democracy" in
which the head of government serves at the pleasure of the legislature,
says @AlanDersh
. At the time the US Constitution was written in
1787, there was no such system.https://t.co/pDM8hgiJ5E
Since the 2010
election, 25 states have instituted new restrictions that make it harder
to vote. The measures include shorter voting hours; the shuttering of
polling places in minority neighborhoods; and new limitations on early
voting. https://t.co/7rlXpgLTeR
Let's not
kid ourselves, Jackie. They've been doing this for at least 16
years now - and I believe there's even a term for it! The first
step in fixing a problem is identifying it: They're not better
than this. https://t.co/8rr3t0zO02
Just a thought
but if you find yourself on national TV arguing that something the
president just said is probably not a death threat maybe you should
pause and reconsider your choices https://t.co/E5veeEcUub
I think that the underlying dynamics have, if anything gotten stronger since 2017. Trump's solid base of support is now, by any reasonable definition, a cult of personality. Republicans' ability to distance themselves the administration has diminished as Trump has grown less tolerant of dissent.
All of this raises interesting points about the next few days.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) predicted on Tuesday
that Republicans will split with President Trump within months unless
the administration changes course.0
"My prediction is he keeps up on this path...within three, four months
you're going to see a whole lot of Republicans breaking with him,"
Schumer said during an interview with ABC's "The View."
Schumer argued while most GOP lawmakers aren't yet willing to break
publicly from the White House, they are privately having "real problems"
with Trump's policies in his first month.
"A lot of the Republicans, they're mainstream people. ... They will feel they have no choice but to break with him," he said.
GOP leadership are largely dismissing any early signs of discord between
Congress and the White House as they slowly try to make progress on an
ambitious agenda.
So while it is hard to deny that Trump is amazingly unpopular for a new
president, unless his approval ratings trend farther down the way even
those of popular presidents typically do, his party may not suffer the
kind of humiliation Democrats experienced in 2010. For all the shock
Trump has consistently inspired with his behavior as president, there’s
not much objective reason for Republican politicians to panic and begin
abandoning him based on his current public standing. But in this as in
so many other respects, we are talking about an unprecedented chief
executive, so the collapse some in the media and the Democratic Party
perceive as already underway could yet arrive.
The relationship between the Trump/Bannon White House and the GOP
legislature is perhaps uniquely suited for a textbook game theory
analysis. In pretty much all previous cases, relationships between
presidents and Congress have been complicated by numerous factors other
than naked self-interest--ideological, partisan, personal, cultural--but
this time it's different. With a few isolated exceptions, there is no
deeply held common ground between the White House and Capitol Hill. The
current arrangement is strictly based on people getting things they care
about in exchange for things they don't.
However, while the relationship is simple in those terms, it is
dauntingly complex in terms of the pros and cons of staying versus
going. If the Republicans stand with Trump, he will probably sign any
piece of legislation that comes across his desk (with this White House,
"probably" is always a necessary qualifier). This comes at the cost of
losing their ability to distance themselves from an increasingly
unpopular and scandal-ridden administration.
Some of that distance might be clawed back by public criticism of the
president and by high-profile hearings, but those steps bring even
greater risks. Trump has no interest in the GOP's legislative agenda, no
loyalty to the party, and no particular affection for its leaders.
Worse still, as Josh Marshall has frequently noted, Trump has the
bully's instinctive tendency to go after the vulnerable. There is a
limit to the damage he can inflict on the Democrats, but he is in a
position to literally destroy the Republican Party.
We often hear this framed in terms of Trump supporters making trouble in
the primaries, but that's pre-2016 thinking. This goes far deeper. In
addition to a seemingly total lack of interpersonal, temperamental, and
rhetorical constraints, Trump is highly popular with a large segment of
the base. In the event of an intra-party war, some of this support would
undoubtedly peel away, but a substantial portion would stay.
Keep in mind, all of this takes place in the context of a troubling
demographic tide for the Republicans. Their strategic response to this
has been to maximize turnout within the party while suppressing the vote
on the other side. It has been a shrewd strategy but it leaves little
margin for error. Trump has the ability to drive a wedge between a
significant chunk of the base and the GOP for at least the next few
cycles, possibly enough to threaten the viability of the party.
The closest analogy that comes to mind is the Democrats and Vietnam, but
that was a rift in a big-tent loosely organized party. The 21st Century
GOP is a small tent party that depends on discipline and entrenchment
strategies. It's not clear that it would survive a civil war.
Given that, I suspect the next year or two will prove Schumer wrong. There is some evidence
that the president's polling has stabilized, perhaps even rebounded a
bit, but even if the numbers go back into free fall, Republicans in the
House and the Senate will be extremely reluctant to break from Trump
with anything more than isolated or cosmetic challenges.
This isn't just a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent pissing
in; this is a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent tossing
grenades.
I'm about to do one of those things that annoys the hell out of me when other people do it, namely taking a well-defined technical concept and trying to generalize it in order to make some big sweeping statements. So I start with apologies, but I think this goes to the heart of many of the problems we've been seeing with journalism and the public discourse (and also explains much of the difficulty that a lot of us run into when we tried to address those problems).
If we think of orthogonal data in the broad sense as something that brings in new information, it gives us a useful way of thinking about the discussion process. I'm thinking in a practical, not a theoretical sense here. Obviously a mathematical theorem does not technically bring any new information into a system, but in practical terms, it can certainly increase our knowledge. By the same token, a new argument may simply present generally known facts in a new light, but it can still increase our understanding. (You might argue at this point that I'm conflating knowledge and understanding. You'd probably be right, but, in this context, I think it's a distinction without a difference.)
My hypothesis here is that (putting aside literary considerations for the moment), good journalism should be judged mainly on the criteria of accuracy and orthogonality, with the second being, if anything, more important than the first. Instead, we often see indifference to accuracy and barely concealed hostility toward orthogonality. We do see a great deal of lip service toward diversity of opinion, but the majority of that "diversity" is distinctly non-orthogonal, falling on the same axes of the previous arguments, just going the opposite direction.
For example, imagine a disgruntled employee locked in an office with a gun. "He's willing to shoot."/"He's not willing to shoot" are nonorthogonal statements even though they contradict each other. By comparison, "he doesn't have any bullets" would be orthogonal. I'd put most of the discussion about liberal bias in the mainstream media squarely in the nonorthogonal category, along with every single column written by Bret Stephens for the New York Times.
Nonorthogonal debate has become the default mode for most journalists. What's more, they actually feel good about themselves for doing it. Whenever you have an expert say "is," you are absolutely required to find another who will say "is not." This practice has deservedly been mocked in cases where one of the arguments is far more convincing than the other (as with global warming), but even when there's some kind of rough symmetry between the positions, it is still a dangerously constrained and unproductive way of discussing a question.
Despite climate
alarmist predictions, humans will likely survive for hundreds of
millions of years into the future. In the meantime, we should begin
creating atmospheres on suitable moons or planets. https://t.co/qsBtkbsNAY
Sen: physics, not
magic, still applies on Titan. Atoms of O cannot be “made” by an
organism, they come from sources around it (e.g. CO2, H2O). New types of
atoms are made in nuclear, not chemical/biological reactions. This
isn’t a genetics question, it’s middle-school
physics.
Herman Cain gave a speech to a group of Young Republicans and the subject of the space shuttle came up:
In
his speech, Cain praised President John F. Kennedy as a "great leader"
for inspiring a national effort to put a man on the moon, a goal
achieved when astronaut Neil Armstong stepped onto the moon's surface in
1969.
"He didn't say, 'We might.' He didn't say, 'Let's take a
poll,'" Cain said. "He said, 'We will.' And we did. Only for this
president to move us back by canceling a major part of our space
program."
Cain also criticized Obama for using Russian technology to ferry astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station.
"I
can tell you that as president of the United States, we are not going
to bum a ride to outer space with Russia," Cain said to loud applause.
"We're going to regain our rightful place in terms of technology, space
technology."
I don't know what the reaction of the crowd was
(the reporting wasn't that detailed) but I'd imagine it was friendly.
You can usually get a warm response from a Republican crowd by coming
out in favor of manned space exploration which is, when you think about,
strange as hell.
If you set out to genetically engineer a
program that libertarians ought to object to, you'd probably come up
with something like the manned space program. A massive government
initiative, tremendously expensive, with no real role for individual
initiative. Compared to infrastructure projects the benefits to business
are limited. You could even argue that the government's presence in the
field crowds out private development.
(Much has been made of the
rise of private space firms, but barring a really big and unexpected
technological advance, their role is going to be limited to either
unmanned missions or human flights in low earth orbit for the
foreseeable future.)
There have been efforts in
libertarian-leaning organs (The Wall Street Journal, Reason, John
Tierney's NYT columns) trying to argue that interplanetary exploration
can be done on the cheap. These usually rely heavily on the blatant low-balling of Robert Zubrin* (Tierney, a science writer who has no grasp of science, made a particularly ripe mark),
but even if we were to accept these numbers, it's still difficult to
reconcile this kind of government program with libertarian values.
I know you're all tired of hearing this, but there's something strange about equating electability with white and male in 2020.
A frustration I
heard from female Dems last week was that gender was getting singled out
as an "electability" issue, but no other thing that
voters say they're uncomfortable with. Lots of polling on gay
nominee, nominee over age 70, socialist, etc. https://t.co/T2dHUKxN3E
What’s the German
word for when you open twitter and you’re halfway through reading a
tweet when the app refreshes and you can never find that tweet
again?
Years ago, in a
piece for an Australian magazine about the Murdoch empire in news, I
wrote that denial is a constitutive feature of the company and its
culture. https://t.co/BSRIXcmLwD
"Denial, I think, is the key to understanding the
company."
"San
Francisco-based DoorDash raised in the past two years nearly $2 billion,
cash it used to grow to more than 4,000 markets this year from 600
markets in 2018, said a person familiar with the matter. About
three-quarters of its markets aren’t profitable, the person
said."
McKinsey
& Company’s ties to Enron, Purdue Pharma, the Saudi Government
and now...the Houston Astros! The Houston GM came from McKinsey. https://t.co/eQlNZ0AeNC
The 26 richest
people on Earth now own as much as the 3.8 billion who form the poorer
*half* of the planet’s population. Again, 26 people
own as much as 3.8 billion people. 26 v.
3,800,000,000
A while back, we had a discussion on the closeness of the 2016 electoral college vote and how best to quantify it. I argued that the best approach was to look at the minimum number of votes that would have to change in order to get a different outcome. For the last election, that was around 80,000 votes which, I argued, constituted a close race. I got some pushback so I thought I’d fill oout some of the details, starting with why we should bother with the question at all.
Different kinds of wins have different implications, both strategic and psychological. If there’s a disconnect between the way people are reacting and the actual events, that is in and of itself a phenomena worth noting and studying, but if they are making decisions based on those misinterpretations and false narratives, the problem becomes both important and urgent.
The disconnect around the closeness of Donald Trump‘s victory has manifested itself in at least a couple of ways. First is the theory that Hillary Clinton didn’t just lose, but that it wasn’t’ even close. The argument goes on to say that, in order to win, the Democrats would need to add millions to their popular vote advantage to overcome the biases of the electoral college.
Second is the belief that the margin of defeat was so massive that the Democrats need to do everything differently this time. This has particularly centered on going back to what is traditionally considered a more electable candidate. Specifically a white male from north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
"Unlikable" smacks of sexism but is a
metric we must contend with in a close election. Warren is impressive
& substantive. Yet a 69-year-old, impressive woman was a
disaster in 2016, and (as is the definition of insanity) we should not
expect a different outcome in 2020. https://t.co/7CfR5ESF9I
Since every woman who has been successful enough to compete at that level will have to deal with charges of unlikeability, this is basically saying the Democrats need to nominate a man,
Obviously, any conversations about the closeness of an electoral college win are going to be problematic. Every statement will rest on an edifice of challengeable assumptions and definitions, none of which can ever rise above the standard of merely reasonable.
Nonetheless, this is an absolutely necessary conversation. It matters whether or not Hillary Clinton lost by 80,000 votes, 2 million votes, or somewhere in between, both in terms of our analyses and our decisions.
The moderators of this week's Democratic debate have taken some well deserved heat for asking Sanders to respond to alleged comments about the electability of women, then asking Warren a question with a premise that contradicted the first answer.
Putting aside for the moment questions of bias against Sanders, this reminded me of the platonic ideal of inattentive interviewing.
One on the electability of women, the other on the lack of electability of a demographic that includes Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg... (apply all appropriate caveats)
The electoral discussion among pundits and data journalists has been
taking some especially silly turns of late and before the bullshit
accumulates to the same dangerous level it did in 2016, we need to step
back and address the bad definitions, absurd assumptions, and muddled
thinking before it gets too deep.
We should probably start with the idea electability. While we can argue
about the exact definition, it should not mean likely to be elected and
it absolutely cannot mean will be elected.
Any productive definition of electability has got to be based on the
notion of having reasonable prospect of winning. With this in mind, it
is ridiculous to argue that Hillary Clinton was not electable. Lots of
things had to break Trump's way for him to win the election and, while
we can never say for certain what repeated runs of the simulation would
show, there is no way to claim that we would have gotten the same
outcome the vast majority of the time.
This leads us to a related dangerous and embarrassing trend, the
unmooring of votes and outcomes. This is part of a larger genre of bad
data journalism that tries to argue that relationships which are
strongly correlated and even causal are unrelated because they are not
deterministic and/or linear. In this world, profit or even potential
profit is not relevant when discussing a startup's success. Diet and
exercise have no effect on weight loss. With a little digging you can
undoubtedly come up with numerous other examples.
The person who wins the popular vote may not win the electoral college,
but unless you have a remarkably strong argument to the contrary, that
is the way that smart money should bet.
This picks up on a recent thread (telling which one might be too much of
a clue). The ones and zeros represent a trait of Democratic candidates
from 1964 to 2004. Take a look and think about it for a moment. Here's a
hint, the trait is something associated with each man well before he
ran for president.
Johnson 1
Humphrey 0
McGovern 0
Carter 1
Mondale 0
Dukakis 0
Clinton 1
Gore 1
Kerry 0
As you might have guessed, the relationship between this trait and
the popular vote didn't hold in the previous or following elections. The
trait is not at all obscure. It was well known at the time and figured
prominently into their political personas, This is not a trick question.
Just to get this out of the way, all major entertainment awards are largely worthless. Poor as measures of talent, even worse as indicators of artistic quality, but even by this debased standard, the Golden Globes stand alone in their lack of merit. It has always been and remains a joke.
Winning something like an Oscar or an Emmy probably has less to do with the work and more to do with lobbying and popularity, but it does, at least, represent the approval of the industry. A Critics Choice Award is given by people who watch and write about films for a living. Even the People’s Choice award indicates a level of popular support. The Golden Globes is given out by a small group you've never heard of.
> The award started out as an excuse to party with movie stars but it quickly evolved into one of Hollywood’s most notorious scams. Here are a few highlights from Wikipedia:
1968–1974 NBC broadcast ban
The HFPA has had a lucrative contract with NBC for decades, which began broadcasting the award ceremony locally in Los Angeles in 1958, then nationally in 1964. However, in 1968, the Federal Communications Commission claimed the show "misled the public as to how the winners were determined" (allegations included that winners were determined by lobby; to motivate winners to show up to the awards ceremony winners were informed if they did not attend another winner would be named). The FCC admonished NBC for participating in the scandal. Subsequently, NBC refused to broadcast the ceremony from 1968 until after 1974.
Pia Zadora awarded "New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture" in 1982
In 1982, Pia Zadora won a Golden Globe in the category "New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture – Female" for her performance in Butterfly, over such competition as Elizabeth McGovern (Ragtime) and Kathleen Turner (Body Heat). Accusations were made that the Foreign Press Association members had been bought off. Zadora's husband, multimillionaire Meshulam Riklis, flew voting members to his casino, the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, which gave the appearance that they voted for Zadora to repay this. Riklis also invited voting members to his house for a lavish lunch and a showing of the film. He also spent a great deal on advertising. Furthermore, Zadora had made her film debut some 17 years earlier as a child performer in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
The Tourist for Best Musical/Comedy nominations in 2011
The nominations for the 2011 Golden Globes drew initial skepticism as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association nominated The Tourist in its Best Musical/Comedy category, although it was originally advertised as a spy thriller, and also as one of the most panned films of the season with host Ricky Gervais even jokingly asking the main star of the film, Johnny Depp, if he had seen it. Rumors then surfaced that Sony, the distributor of The Tourist, had influenced Globes voters with an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas, culminating in a concert by Cher.
Keep in mind that Zadora and The Tourist only got attention because they were already punchlines before the Globes. There’s no reason to assume the opaque process was any less corrupt the rest of the time.
Everyone who follows the industry knows the Globes are of no news value to the Golden Globes, but every year we get actual news organizations with actual reputations runs something like this:
ARI SHAPIRO: Was there anything among the winners last night that really raised your eyebrows and you think might hint at the future of TV?
The Golden Globes are a perfect example of journalism's non-news addiction. Everyone knows they are absolutely meaningless, at best telling the viewers nothing more than who wrote the biggest check, but no one can seem to resist them.
"Eventually, for a democracy, the information
comes out," @JamesFallows
says on @ReliableSources.
"Democracies eventually learn the truth. It's better
for the administration, better for the military, better for the public
if we shorten the time that it takes to learn that
truth."
The same disinfo
formula I described in my CNN op-ed last month: Lie on Fox News,
apologize on Twitter or CNN. GOP wants two realities so they can be
Trump propagandists and respected representatives at the same time.
https://t.co/i7G0FrdZot
Two past-weekend
reads: 1) Michael Lind in WSJ arguing that response to
left-behind America is revived labor movement. From book ‘New Class War’
https://t.co/udNs5GPp2D 2) @ChristopherIngraham in WaPo on oversimplifications /
stereotypes re Rural America https://t.co/Hl1yBUQtRFpic.twitter.com/24mAR6xfXe
Please enjoy this
1939(!) brochure introducing the new science of polling.
"Within the past few years a technique for
measuring public opinion has been developed....In the past, estimates of
the strength and trends of public opinion have been based on pure
guesswork." https://t.co/JercykJ75x
Upper income
Republican-leaning Americans are REALLY dug in on the narrative of
individual effort and making your own “good luck”. Lower income
Republicans are not so sure! https://t.co/4hD7hCR7Z8pic.twitter.com/1LEztQwPDh
41% of
Republicans (61% of all Americans) say economic inequality is a major
issue in US today. Of those Republicans, 2/3 agree with higher taxes on
the wealthy. 84% of total population do. Isnt this an open goal? https://t.co/4hD7hCR7Z8pic.twitter.com/KvdBEqN9z3
This is a decidedly unhappy sequel to our previous stories on patent trolls, a grim little good news bad news joke. The good news is that we have found a way to prevent trolls from holding companies hostage with illegitimate claims of intellectual property; the bad news is that we did it by taking away the rights of people with legitimate claims.
If you’re not a patent aficionado, you have probably never heard the phrase “efficient infringement.” Not to blow the punch line, but it’s yet another example of how big tech companies use dubious means to squeeze their smaller rivals. When critics complain that Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are squashing innovation, this is the sort of tactic they’re talking about.
I first heard the phrase some years ago when I looked into a patent dispute between Apple Inc. and the University of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which owns the university’s patents, had sued Apple over its use of an innovation that university scientists had dreamed up and patented in the mid-2000s. Apple had installed it in iPhones and iPads without bothering to negotiate a license and had been using it with impunity for years before the case finally went to trial. A jury found for the foundation in 2015 and ordered Apple to pay $234 million.
That was actually a victory for Apple. Consider: Apple got free use of valuable technology that it took from a smaller, less powerful entity. Losing at trial was unfortunate, perhaps, but the $234 million was just another business expense. Pocket change, really, considering Apple’s size.
How common is this kind of move? Boris Teksler, Apple’s former patent chief, told the Economist recently that “efficient infringement, where the benefits outweigh the legal costs of defending against a suit, could almost be viewed as a ‘fiduciary responsibility,’ at least for cash-rich firms that can afford to litigate without end.” In other words, stealing patented technology is practically required if you’re focused on shareholder value. And who isn’t these days?
...
“What is the definition of a patent?” asked Brian Pomper, the executive director of the Innovation Alliance, which represents small and medium-size patent holders. “It means you have the right to exclude others from your invention.” He added, “How can a patent be meaningful if you don’t have the right to exclude others?” But that’s where we are. Companies like Sonos have virtually no leverage to stop bigger companies with deep pockets from infringing their patents.
